Date: 05-Jan-2009 From: Petra Shenk <petra.shenkgmail.com>Subject: Historical Conflict in Present-Day Interaction: Discursive social action and decision-making for the future of the Chehalis River WatershedE-mail this message to a friend

This dissertation investigates the discursive intersection between progress, consensus, and history in the interactional mediation of conflict and decision making through an examination of watershed management discourse. I identify the semiotic linkages between language, social action, and identity in discourse that emerges during state-authorized watershed planning meetings of the Chehalis Basin Partnership, a collaborative planning unit that facilitates management between stakeholder groups.

Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork and 123 hours of audio-recorded data, I analyze approximately 25 hours of organizational meeting interaction. I also draw on participant observation, informal interviews and discussions with members of the Chehalis Basin Partnership and community.

I begin by tracing the historical and discursive pathways of seemingly disparate documents that inform Partnership policy and action. I demonstrate how a contemporary document is an accumulation of history by virtue of being a collection of entextualizations and illustrate that when historical documents are taken up in contemporary contexts they can mediate different social actions than originally intended. I develop the notions of textual transcendence, a process whereby past documents and specific entextualized language from them are used to mediate future social action, and intertextual network, a grouping of seemingly disparate documents which over time have become linked ideologically, practically, and/or legally. I further illustrate how conflict is interactionally managed using strategies that accomplish the social action of preemptive conflict management. Rather than addressing the historical roots of a regional conflict when it arises, Chehalis Basin Partnership participants maintain consensus and motivate progress by engaging in discourse that legitimizes and delegitimizes certain participants' identities and sociopolitical positions.

This dissertation illustrates how historical facts are discursively displaced by contemporary facts and how the relevance of a historically conflictive relationship is displaced by the organizational importance of present planning and progress. Although the origins of natural-resource-based conflict may not be directly linked to language, the manifestation of conflict as well as its resolution, mediation, or other tactic for addressing it certainly is. Therefore, I demonstrate the importance of examining language about the environment as a set of resources for social action that are sometimes collaborative and sometimes conflictive.